File/Archive: people/w/wilensky.gabriel/please_spare_us.txt
Last-Modified: 2010 July 2
SAN DIEGO, June 13, 2010 (SixMillionCrucifixions.com) - The
Telegraph in the UK and other newspapers recently reported
about a letter written by Pope Pius XII to President Roosevelt.
In this letter, dated August 30, 1943, the pope begged
President Roosevelt to spare Rome from Allied bombing. At a
time of devastating clashes between American and German forces
in Anzio, Monte Cassino and elsewhere, the pope rightly feared
the Americans would bomb Rome and thus likely destroy the
hundreds of church properties in Rome and the Vatican, destroy
priceless Vatican treasure, and even the very symbols of Catholic
identity and power, from the basilica of St. Peter’s to the lives
of the pope, the curia, and thousands of other members of the clergy.
Pope Pius was certainly preoccupied with protecting Rome. So
much so that he seems to have neglected worrying about other
things, like protecting lives, preventing mass murder, and
saving souls, for instance.
When Berlin’s Bishop Preysing pressured the Pope to speak out
against the murder of the Jews, the Pope replied that to him
the most pressing issue was maintaining the Church’s unity
and the trust of Catholics on either side of the conflict.
To the pope, the murder of millions of Jews was less important
than causing the millions of Catholics fighting in the German
armed forces some moral anguish. When a correspondent for
L’Osservatore Romano asked the pope whether he was not going
to protest the extermination of the Jews, the pope answered,
“Dear friend, do not forget that millions of Catholics serve
in the German armies. Shall I bring them into conflicts of
conscience?” <1>
He also wrote to Bishop Preysing that he felt he had to do
whatever was necessary, including sacrificing his moral
standing, to maintain the safety of Rome. And at least with
Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, the British Ambassador to the Vatican,
the pope had lost his moral standing. It’s not too surprising
then to know that Osborne wrote, “I am revolted by Hitler’s
massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand and, on the other,
the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation . . . with the
possibilities of the bombardment of Rome.”<2> Osborne had been
frustrated with the pope for a long time. He had written to
the pope on September 1942 asking him to condemn the
extermination of the Jews of Europe. But the pope did not
allow himself to get entangled in any such public denunciations.
As Osborne wrote to him, “A policy of silence in regard to
such offenses against the conscience of the world must necessarily
involve a renunciation of moral leadership.”<3> Still, the pope
would not budge. The British and the Americans continued to
pressure him until they finally got the pope to make the first
of his two declarations that could be construed as some sort of
condemnation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. The
vehicle for the first of these was the pope’s Christmas 1942
message, broadcast over Vatican Radio and heard by millions of
people. In this tepid and innocuous message, delivered at a time
when millions of Jews had already been murdered, the pope spoke
for about forty-five minutes on other topics, and only at the
end uttered a few sentences lamenting that “hundreds of thousands”
of innocent human beings “were doomed to death”. The pope chose
not to mention that those doomed to death were Jews, or that the
ones killing were Germans, or that what was happening was mass
murder. As always, this was delivered in that typical Vatican
language so vague and obtuse no one really understood what was
being said. As the German ambassador to the Vatican reported to
his superiors after a similar communiqué, “There is less reason t
o object to the terms of this message . . . as only a very small
number of people will recognize in it a special allusion to the
Jewish question.”<4>
Pope Pius also seemed to have forgotten to instruct the faithful
listening that murdering Jews was a crime and a mortal sin, which
meant millions of Catholics went on merrily murdering Jews with a
clean conscience. They never heard from the infallible vicar of
Christ or the vast majority of the clergy that being a part of
the machinery of extermination was a guaranteed ticket to hell.
Aside from the crimes committed by clergy before, during and after
the Second World War, and the colossal moral failures of the Church
vis-à-vis the Holocaust, the Church also failed miserably as a
pastor of souls.
Gabriel Wilensky
http://www.SixMillionCrucifixions.com
Footnotes
1. Statement of Dr. Senatro on March 11, 1963, at a public
discussion in Berlin. Quoted in Guenter Lewy, "The Catholic
Church and Nazi Germany," p. 304
2. Quoted in Garry Wills, "Papal Sin," p. 66
3. Owen Chadwick, "Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War," p. 212-213
4. Weizsäcker to the Foreign Ministry, October 28, 1943, PA Bonn, Inland IIg, 192
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